Can I add a maximum expiry date to a session cookie?

Question

I have set a session cookie, which doesn't have any expiry date and will therefore be deleted when the browser is closed.

Now I would like to add a maximum expiry date, meaning that

• if the browser is closed before the maximum expiry date, my cookie is deleted
• otherwise my cookie will be deleted passed the maximum expiry date

Notice that I don't want to set a "regular" expiry date because that would make my cookie persistent, failing to be deleted when the browser is closed before the expiry date.

The only solution I found is to have a second, persistent, cookie, with the maximum expiry date: I manually delete my first cookie if that second one is not found (expired). Since I would like to write as little information as possible in cookies, I'd prefer if there were another way.

After @CBroe's comment, I'm adding that the cookie is generated on the client side and I don't have an associated server side session where to store a last access timestamp

2018 update

After starting a bounty on this question, I got a couple of answers. Thank you. As a feedback, which could possibly better clarify the purpose of my question, please notice that I am not looking for code to set a persistent cookie or to implement the solution that I already have (set a second persistent cookie). I was hoping for some other creative suggestions. At the moment, I could use Zeeshan's hint and set the timestamp in the value (I would append it to the actual value). That answer is therefore so far the best candidate for being awarded the bounty.

Answer 1

if you want to keep cookie as session cookie you can not set expiry. so you can either set timestamp as cookie value or create new cookie and set value as timestamp.

var timestamp = (new Date()).getTime()
document.cookie = "cookiename=value;  path=/";
document.cookie = "expirycookie="+timestamp+";  path=/";

for only client side solution you can set interval to check cookie timestamp value. add below code to all your pages

   var interval = setInterval(function(){
         var timeStamp = getCookie('expirycookie') 
         if(!timeStamp){clearInterval(interval); return}
         var cookieDuration = 5*60*1000 //expire cookie after 5 min
         if(timeStamp < (new Date()).getTime() - cookieDuration){
           //cookie expired delete here
           document.cookie = 'cookiename=value; Path=/; Expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT;';
           document.cookie = 'expirycookie=value; Path=/; Expires=Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:01 GMT;';
          clearInterval(interval)
        }
      },1000)

function getCookie(cname) {
  var name = cname + "=";
  var ca = document.cookie.split(';');
  for (var i = 0; i < ca.length; i++) {
    var c = ca[i];
    while (c.charAt(0) == ' ') c = c.substring(1);
    if (c.indexOf(name) != -1) return c.substring(name.length, c.length);
  }
  return "";
}